Entertain the idea, for a moment, that Google assigned a quality score to organic search results. Say it was based off of click data and engagement metrics, and that it would function in a similar way to the Google AdWords quality score. How exactly might such a score work, what would it be based off of, and how could you optimize for it?

While there’s no hard proof it exists, the organic quality score is a concept that’s been pondered by many SEOs over the years. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand examines this theory inside and out, then offers some advice on how one might boost such a score.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about organic quality score.

So this is a concept. This is not a real thing that we know Google definitely has. But there’s this concept that SEOs have been feeling for a long time, that similar to what Google has in their AdWords program with a paid quality score, where a page … Read the rest

Webinars are an incredibly popular lead-gen tool in most marketersâ€™ toolkits. However, times have changed (and viewer attention spans have changed with it). Rather than try and force your audience to show up on time for live events and stay for a full hour (ainâ€™t nobody got time for that), it’s time to consider delivering content they can watch anytime they want (just like their Netflix experience). We’re talking on-demand video.

Now I know â€śon-demandâ€ť is an all-the-rage word as of late, but I really mean it. When is the last time you showed up for a live event or watched a television show on time? Can you even remember? I canâ€™t. (Except for that time I bought expensive tickets to Wicked.) Now you can bet Iâ€™m showing up on time for that, because I paid for it. But if itâ€™s free, my pulled-in-one-million-directions brain is going to forgo the things that arenâ€™t urgent (or costly) â€“ which means all those webinars I signed up for are lost conversions for the marketers who run them.

By thinking and delivering on-demand content like Netflix, the power is put in the hands of your audience to consume on … Read the rest

A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, Iâ€™d like to add some important context and detail to the original post.

I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success.

I wouldnâ€™t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend.

“Trend” is the important word here. If youâ€™re looking for a dramatic step … Read the rest

Keyword Research is a very different field than it was just five years ago, and if we don’t keep up with the times we might end up doing more harm than good. From the research itself to the selection and targeting process, in today’s Whiteboard Friday Rand explains what has changed and what we all need to do to conduct effective keyword research today.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

What do we need to change to keep up with the changing world of keyword research?

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about keyword research, why it’s changed from the last five, six years and what we need to do differently now that things have changed. So I want to talk about changing up not just the research but also the selection and targeting process.

There are three big areas that I’ll cover here. There’s lots more in-depth stuff, but I think we should start with these three.

If you’re like a lot of people (myself included) it’s very easy to go into an analytics package and focus only on conversion rate. We look at reports like the one below and make short-sighted decisions:

Looking at only the information above, we might decide that “Organic Search” is a bad channel. Making decisions on how successful a channel is based only on conversion rate is short-sighted and will cost you money. Instead, I urge you to think of your channels like a soccer team.

A sensible soccer formation looks something like the image below:

You have one goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders and attackers. You would never think of creating a team of only 11 strikers. But that’s exactly what we do with our channels all the time. We create a team that looks like this:

We have a team of channels that are all being graded on their ability to “score goals”Ă˘Â€Â”please don’t make this mistake. I’m okay with the fact that some of my channels have a low “e-commerce” conversion rate; that may not be what they’re designed to do.